I came into the Writing for the Social Sciences class expecting to be perfectly fine because my previous writing class tested my ability to write in a way that it had not been before. I had always expected writing to be about making statements and not about directly saying what I am feeling but instead writing more subtly about what I am feeling. I was very surprised when I realized that this class is much more focused on writing in the first person, something that I rarely had to do previously when it came to writing. I have always had to write something based on some form of literature, that means that I did not need to write in the first person or talk to other people about my work. In fact, all I would have to do is read some article and analyze it and not have to discuss the work with anyone but the teacher unless I wanted to talk about it. But I learned many different strategies in writing because of this class.

The first thing I learned is writing in the first person. It was a very difficult transition since making statements instead of personal opinion is more effective at convincing an audience. Instead, I had to adapt and change my usual style of writing in order to more effectively write the assignments in the class. Towards the beginning of the semester, it was very clear that I was not used to writing in this manner and most of my work appeared as more objective than subjective.I later gained experience in being a more versatile writer because I had to adjust to the different style of writing and had to put in my emotions and prejudices into places I would not usually not. The discussion boards helped very much with the process, but the seven sentence limit made it difficult to fully express what I was feeling in a way that flowed effectively.

Part of the discussion board assignments was to answer three vital questions. Those are: what intrigued, surprised, and disturbed me. Coming up with answers for these were sometimes very difficult and could lead to very stale answers on occasion. Over time, answering each question became easier and it almost became second nature. Surprisingly, I also started using these questions in other papers since the questions also help to figure out any other article that I had a difficult time understanding. Through these questions, I can more easily understand the article and even use them to set up for the writing portion of the assignment. Planning, drafting, and finalizing the work is much easier when I know what certain parts of the reading make me feel and I can then implement that into the organization of my actual paper.

This can clearly be seen in my work. While the discussion board assignments improved very minimally, the significant papers had drastic chances. For example, the personal artifact essay, it was in the first person for most of the paper, but I did not actually talk about how my artifact made me feel. All I simply did was report my findings on my own artifact. In hindsight, I probably should have used an artifact that gave me more of an emotional connection. When I started working on the observational essay I was still not very used to positioning myself. I did it more than the first paper and the emotions I did feel felt more genuine than those of the personal artifact essay.

By the time I had to start working on the observational paper, I knew how to incorporate my emotions a bit better than before. It was especially apparent because I had many more thick descriptions in the paper compared to the other papers. I also had very strong emotions written in the paper because I was very sick and I was also very accustomed to the subculture I was describing in the paper. The mini-ethnography was when I personally think I figured out how to properly convey my emotions onto a paper. The experience of interviewing people in a place I did not know at all would lead to many strong emotions that I attempted to express on the paper as clearly as I could. One of the major problems with the mini-ethnography was that the word count went over the directions word count. While I was editing out sentences, I did not realize that it would damage the format of the paper in the other pages, so the paper appeared a bit messy.

Writing has many different types of styles, and I was thankful for realizing that during this semester. I am very happy to say that I have some grasp of understanding when writing in the first person and I also now know that there is not a single way to write a paper and that the writing process is what the author makes of it. The type of style I choose to write really depends on the situation, but students usually write in the third person. Thankfully, taking notes in the first person makes reading feel more personal and it makes the drafting process much more simple.